Crocodile hunt

Historical Context

Crocodile Hunt at the Musée de Picardie (1739) is a companion piece to the Leopard Hunt of 1736, showing Boucher tackling the exotic animal genre in a second major composition. Crocodile hunts — European hunters pursuing Nile crocodiles in an Egyptian or African landscape setting — were a niche within the grand decorative animal painting tradition, their exotic geography and dangerous animals providing maximum spectacle. The subject required Boucher to depict an unfamiliar animal convincingly, presumably from natural history illustrations and reports rather than direct observation. The two Picardie hunt paintings together document a brief engagement with the decorative animal painting tradition from which Boucher quickly moved on to the mythological and pastoral subjects that better suited his temperament and the market's demands. The Musée de Picardie's holdings of these unusual early Bouchers make it an important site for understanding his full career range.

Technical Analysis

The painting reveals François Boucher's sensuous brushwork and keen understanding of animal anatomy and movement. The naturalistic rendering of form and texture demonstrates careful study from life, while pastel palette lends the image its distinctive vitality.

Look Closer

◆The crocodile is rendered with impressive specificity for an artist who almost certainly never saw one — the scaling patterns, the protruding eye ridges, and the jaw teeth are zoologically credible.
◆The hunters are dressed in European clothing rather than Egyptian or African costume, creating the visual paradox of French sportsmen in a Nile setting — an exotic fantasy made familiar.
◆The compositional action spirals from the crocodile's snapping jaw at lower right through the struggling hunters and up to the rearing horse at upper left — a dynamic coil of violence.
◆Boucher uses the crocodile's broad, flat body as a compositional base element — its horizontal mass stabilizes the turbulent action above it.
◆The lush riverside vegetation is painted in deep tropical greens that differ from Boucher's typical pale-blue pastoral settings, signaling the exotic geographic displacement.